Unboxing PM E-Vidya Scheme: Why won’t online learning work in India
As the new school session reopens, children smell their new books, try new uniforms and wait to share summer shenanigans with their friends. With the global pandemic, the new school session will be different. Mobile phones, tablets, and laptops have turned many students’ homes into classrooms, while for others, the new session may not begin until the physical spaces we call schools open. Unfortunately, the recent announcement of the fifth tranche of economic relief package did not bring any solace for the latter.
On 17th May, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced PM e-Vidya scheme which will allow multi-mode access to online education. It focusses on a range of measures including mobile applications, TV channels, community radio and podcasts. The government claims it will benefit 25 crore school students and 3.7 crore students enrolled in higher education. But before we hail digital education as the new panacea, we must realise the scheme assumes access to smartphones, internet and DTH connection. We live in a country where 24% of Indians own a smartphone, only 15% of the rural population has access to the internet and the number of DTH subscribers is mere 69.3 million. The new scheme seems to have failed to include the needs of the marginalised, rural and economically backward communities into their narrative of the new ‘Aatma Nirbhar’ India.
Even with the population that has access to internet and smartphone, the PM e-Vidya scheme excludes them piece by piece. Under ‘One Nation, One Platform’, the government promoted DIKSHA app to access e-learning content available in 14 languages. The ground reality is India has 47 languages as a medium of instruction. One app can not cater to the diversity in India. So one has to ask, why have we left them behind during the global pandemic?
To include students who do not have access to the internet and smartphones, the government launched the ‘One Class, One Channel’ initiative where each class from Grade 1 to 12 will get a dedicated channel. For the new DTH channels, the government had asked NCERT to work on the content. However, what remains unclear is the role of state boards in the initiative. Will the states have the freedom to develop content or we will broadcast a centralised curriculum from NCERT? Besides, learning is not one way and with lectures beaming out of screens, it is also ambiguous how teachers will monitor and evaluate students’ learning.
One strand of the scheme also focuses on increasing penetration by extensive use of community radios and podcasts. The only podcast that exists is Shiksha Vani which has CBSE content for grade 9–12. Without clear guidelines on the use of 289 community radio channels, and training teachers on using them, it adds little value to provide personalised learning. Special e-content is developed for visually impaired and deaf students on Digitally Accessible Information System and in sign language on NIOS website/YouTube. The state of students with disabilities was dire before COVID-19 and it is unlikely to change with digital content available. Visual and hearing impaired students are only less than half of the differently abled community. Education for differently-abled is much more nuanced than making e-learning available and a top-down approach is not going to solve it.
E-Vidya scheme can have a higher impact if it decentralises its implementation — allowing states/districts to curate content for DIKSHA, community radios and TV Channels. The government should also consider supplementing it with SMS based or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) based learning to include students with low tech or no tech. These tools will give the power back into teachers’ hands who knows each student best, allowing them to differentiate learning. The education departments should also plan for distributing free textbooks through ration shops, since 68% of parents in Delhi said they want textbooks to accompany online learning.
However, our customer is our children and their needs come before any Math or Science lessons. Teachers have always played the role of secondary caregivers in the child’s life and right now have an important responsibility of ensuring children’s social-emotional wellbeing. But currently government school teachers cannot connect to their students even though a simple phone call because they do not have access to their students’ database. Getting teachers contact information of their students will not only help them connect to make students feel safe but also increase their network to enrol them in WhatsApp or SMS groups.
E-Vidya scheme ends when the school opens, but what happens next? With a shorter academic year and longer gap in studies for children excluded through e-Vidya, we must think how we will aid our students’ rapid learning recovery? There is a long time before we move fully online but even with technological augmentations in our learning landscape, let us train our teachers and equip them with skills to deal with the new demands of the new normal.
